Monday, February 03, 2014

Child abuse

Imagine if you will a 7 year old girl who said that the male adult in her home had molested her; the police were called and said that while they found substance to the allegation, they thought the girl was too fragile to be a witness in a prosecution, and so declined to prosecute. Now imagine that 22 years later she repeated her allegations. Take away the celebrity parents. How would you want our society to react?

I hope that you would want them to support the girl. But nobody in the press seems to want to support Dylan Previn (or whatever her name is now). Article after article, including by respectable writers in the Globe and Mail, are trashing her. As Kate Taylor wrote today, "the man has a right to be tried in a court of law not the court of Twitter."

This issue is important because of the people who are watching it play out: the abuse victims who are afraid to speak up, the abusers who are getting away with it, the potential abusers who are reckoning whether they can get away with it, the witnesses who are trying to decide if they should risk speaking up. This isn't about celebrities; it's about children who are being heinously harmed.